loyalty

忠

ㄓㄨㄥ zhōng

Two versions of the same picture, and both are free with no account and no watermark. The first has no background at all, which is the one to send your artist — but a phone or computer photo viewer set to dark will show black strokes on dark grey and it can look like nothing downloaded. If that happens, use the second one: identical characters on a plain white background. Either way you get the characters on their own — the square and the faint guide lines you see above are not in the file. Each character is 1000px, so a two-character download is 2000×1000, and the script and layout are the ones you picked.

Script

Characters

Layout

Faithfulness to a person, a country or a cause, historically to a ruler.

Before you commit

Choose with care忠 historically means loyalty upward: subject to ruler, employee to company. It does not carry the between-equals loyalty of friendship. 義 does.

JapaneseShared with Japanese, read chu, with the same feudal weight. Also common as a name element.

Cultural note盡忠報國, serve the country with utter loyalty, is the phrase legend puts on the general Yue Fei. It reads as patriotic, not personal.

Meaning

Loyal, faithful, devoted.

心 under 中 — the structure is not in doubt. Traditionally explained as an undivided heart, though 中 is there mainly for the sound rather than the sense. A core Confucian virtue either way.

Other characters for “loyalty”

What to do next

Pick the script and layout you want above, download the PNG, and send that file to your artist. Ask them to work from the file rather than redrawing the character freehand — that is where strokes go missing.

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